The delegation of capitalist power to state officials and
institutions is another major masking, perhaps the most widespread
application of Machiavelli's advice to his Prince. Government
power, in both overt and subtle forms, is enlisted in the service
of capitalist priorities and needs; it then serves a secondary
function by acting as the lightning rod for spontaneous mass
protest against the effects of those priorities. (Note that the
DAN call is for resistance "against state authority and
repression.")(4)

"State" and "market" are therefore twin disguises. The entire
mainstream political discourse, on the spectrum between "free
market" conservatives and "interventionist" liberals, appears in
this light as a battle between two strategies for ruling-class
control, with differing degrees of emphasis on the two different
masks.

The other disguises may be mentioned briefly. "Bureaucrats"
are the actual human beings who act out roles in the system of
oppression. They are the ones who hire, fire, explain why things
can or cannot be done, why additional forms must be filled out,
etc. They are visible and therefore easy targets; if people lose
their tempers, bureaucrats are usually at the receiving end. The
"existential scarcity" mask is the notion that exploitative
deprivation is nothing but a specific instance of natural limits
beyond human control; the ruling class in effect conceals its own
free ride by telling us that "there is no such thing as a free
lunch." (Cute talk about "a world free of charge" gives an opening
to this sort of posturing.) Finally, "experts" are visible as an
"other," and may therefore serve as a scapegoat. Technical and
scientific personnel of course, not to speak of most academic
intellectuals, act at the behest of their employers, so it is easy
to confuse the capitalist prerogatives guiding and limiting the
application of expertise with expertise in general.

Anarchists are sensitive to the fact that the state,
bureaucrats and experts occupy distinct social locations, which may
serve as sources of privilege and power in a society without
capital or capitalists. But do they fail to see that, unless we
grasp the non-obvious linkages of these various roles to the
underlying source of oppressive power in capitalist society, we
will never arrive at the point where they can be transformed and
made to serve the majority?

The battle to democratize administration, science, and
creativity will be protracted. It will pass through stages
("stages" is yet another concept that is foreign to simplistic
anarchist thinking): an early one at which democratic control over
these functions -- their mandate and execution -- is established,
a higher one at which the functions themselves progressively cease
to belong to distinct and separate strata; and perhaps a still
higher one at which some of the functions themselves disappear.
(Science and creativity, I would hope, will always be around.) But
to attack the administrative/technical strata as such, without
perceiving their masking function for capitalist power, is to fall
into the Prince's trap: we will then fail to build the alliances,
political instruments, and understandings that we need if we are to
mount an effective challenge to capitalism.

In sum: we need to not fear administration, politics and
science. We do need to learn how to use them against the cunning
of capitalism, how to build movements uniting "those who stand to
lose the most" and the vast majority with a great deal to gain.
This will mean using every tool at our disposal, including specific
evolved forms of both the state and markets. Finally, we must find
a way to use the Internet -- to let it serve communication without
allowing it to prevent serious thinking. If all this amounts to a
defense of science, and politics, against their detractors, then so
be it. Knowledge and democracy will change the world; "blockaders,
saboteurs and drummers" will, at best, make a momentary impression
on it.

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IN THIS ISSUE

Marxist thought has been in the forefront of study of the
large-scale dimension of social reality, in which entire social
systems undergo evolution and transformation over long time
periods. Recent work by Andre Gunder Frank, expanding upon the
core assumptions of world-systems theory, extends capitalism as a
world system in time and space, well beyond its presumed origins in
the European late middle ages. Thus, the notion of Chinese
civilization over four millennia as an integral part of a
capitalist world system is used in an assault on Eurocentrism --
the doctrine that capitalism, and with it all sources of technology
and progress, have their origins in some unique moral or
intellectual characteristics of Europeans.

The critique of Eurocentrism may run aground, however, if its
empirical foundation is doubtful or if it rests on categories that
inappropriately universalize capitalism and lose sight of stadial
specificity in history. Ricardo Duchesne's study, "Between
Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism: Debating Andre Gunder Frank's Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age" is a thorough examination
of both the empirical and conceptual aspects of this issue. It
raises once again the central question of the sources of divergence
in social development -- especially the problem of explaining the
breakthrough to trade and commercialization in Renaissance Europe,
and why that explosion led to capitalist development in Northern
Europe and Britain while similar commercial development in the
ancient Mediterranean, China, India, Africa and elsewhere did not,
despite the evident parity in technical and scientific achievement
in many of those places, especially China. Explanations based on
contingent factors, such as geographical proximity to the Western
hemisphere and the role of infectious diseases in conquering the
peoples of that hemisphere, are not sufficient in themselves.

When we published the landmark study by William I. Robinson
and Jerry Harris, "Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalization
and the Transnational Capitalist Class" (Spring 2000), we expected
a strong response. That expectation proved to be correct, and we
are pleased to present, as what we hope will be only the beginning
of a process of continued exploration in our pages into the nature
and evolution of the capitalist ruling class, a collection of five
critical responses to the Robinson-Harris paper. "The
Transnational Ruling Class Formation Thesis: A Symposium" brings
together contributions by Michael Mann, Giovanni Arrighi, Jason W.
Moore, Robert Went, and Kees van der Pijl, together with a response
by William I. Robinson. In this connection, the decision of the
joint authors of the Robinson-Harris paper, is for one author
(Robinson) to reply on his own behalf, so that he can present his
position in relation to his own work developed in a series of prior
publications; the other author (Harris) may weigh in with his own
contribution at a later stage.

Without "taking sides," I would simply point out that
Robinson's "Response to Critics" brings the discussion to a vital
frontier: the evolving nature and role of the nation-state in
capitalist inter-cum-trans-national relations. Coming to terms
with the nation-state as such alone can ground -- provide validity
criteria for -- a characterization of any particular line of
thought as "nation-state-centric." This observation should be
construed as what it is: an invitation for state-theory adherents
to enter the discussion. State theorists and political economists
should add their unique analytical dimensions to the exciting work
on the global capitalist class which -- judging by the
preponderance of the contributors to this round -- seems to be
occurring largely in sociology departments (and their European
equivalents).

The second collective discussion in this issue is "A Debate"
on "Time, Logic and Structure in Value Theory," occasioned by David
Laibman's article "Rhetoric and Substance in Value Theory: An
Appraisal of the New Orthodox Marxism" (Fall 2000). Guglielmo
Carchedi's title, "On Temporality, Simultaneity and TSS," refers to
the "Temporal Single System" (TSS) school in Marxist political
economy, which defends the literal truth of Marx's formalizations
in Capital III by tying value to the passage of time, differential
dating of inputs and outputs, and (in some versions) continual
change in technology. Carchedi presents a clear and useful account
of this position, based on his own work going back some years
before the most recent flurry of TSS activity. Fred Moseley's
paper, "Marx's Alleged Logical Error," is a tour de force of Marx
scholarship, using both the published sources and some hitherto
unpublished passages to establish the exact nature of Marx's
intentions with regard to value, cost price and price of
production. Needless to say, Marx's "logical error" turns out in
this account to be "alleged," but non-existent. David Laibman's
reply focuses on his view of what the theory of value is intended
to accomplish, and what should be the relation of ongoing study of
Marx's texts to the wider pursuit of Marxist scholarship. As with
all discussions in the pages of S&S, we look forward not to
"completion" but to progress, and to ever-wider ranges of
participation.

D. L.

1. "The Basic Ideas of Anarchism," chapter 1 of Anarchism: From
Theory to Practice. Online at www.geocities.com.

2. Some of Bakunin's insights are especially noteworthy; viz.,
"man" is both "the most individual and the most social of the
animals." We will return to the "species being question" in
future editorials; cf. "Editorial Perspectives," Winter 1997-98.

3. I have previously quoted Bakunin: "Marx spoils the workers; he
makes logic-choppers out of them" ("Editorial Perspectives,"
Fall 2001). Here he contradicts his own insight noted above.

4. The state is to the capitalist class as the managing agent is
to the landlord. How many New York housing tenants still
think that their managing agent, to whom they write the rent
checks, is the landlord? In some cases it is no easy matter
to ascertain the identity of the landlord, so well hidden is
this information in the obfuscating maze of corporate control.

I do not mean to assert a narrow instrumental view of the
state here, or to preempt the ongoing investigation into the
relation between agency and structure in the state, the degree
of relative autonomy, etc. The derivative role of the state
is entirely objective; it is consistent with quite different
degrees of perceived and/or actual independence on the part of
state functionaries.